Skidmore students, Anamaria, Allison, and Marco, speak about their time with the Skidmore-Saratoga Consulting Program and their real-world experiences of consulting for Davin Workforce Solutions.

[Anamaria] What I think for me, the biggest takeaway here has been the fact that I have been able to implement what I have learned in Business and Management department to a client. And also meeting all these amazing people that work for Davin. And it has been a great experience. And I think that I made some new friends. 

[Allison] The biggest thing I learned I would say would probably be just learning how to be a better communicator. Sometimes, it’s difficult to articulate questions and try to figure out, you know, not only what are people saying, but what are people not saying. The entrepreneurial process is messy and there aren’t clear answers sometimes. Just understanding that it is not just about learning something from a textbook but when you are actually going to apply it. It’s not always just option A, option B, option C and there is one right answer. It’s kind of navigating, you know, checks and balances and you don’t really get to know, you know, what is the right answer. And you just kind of have to try and iterate and fail a million times and try again.

[Marco] For me, learning the organizational behavior back at Skidmore, it’s a totally different story than when we were looking, really looking at one organization structure. And try to understand how it works. And it was also helpful for us to later on in our career to understand how the organization works and how do we treat difference such as hierarchy and other kind of organizational structures.

[Anamaria] And I think we are all so thankful for DAVIN for giving us the opportunity to do all of this and to learn such valuable lessons at the same time.

[Allison] This is a nice culminating experience to think about all that work that we did and then to present it and be like “Ah, here it is”.

[Marco] We had the opportunity to meet with the staff every week. And that’s a great opportunity for us to get updates from both sides and try to give us more insight about where we should be going towards. And I think that the co-creating process is very helpful.

[Anamaria] Our Thursday meetings were a lot of fun and we got to talk and, I don’t know, brainstorm together with DAVIN. And then finally to the presentation which, all my gosh, we put in so much of ourselves into it, but also the feedback that we got from the client. And it’s like “Oh, we did this together”. 

[Everyone] Yea.